one more commitment in her professional life, that she would collapse under all those demands. Her dreams, however, brought up some positive images that showed another approach. In one dream, after she had chosen the hardest and fastest way to get where she was going, a voice told her to slow down and take an easier path, assuring Susan she would get there in her own good time. In other dreams she found herself floating peacefully down a river.
Susan began to realize that much of her push, drive, and urge to control belonged to her mother rather than herself. She also became aware that the depression she felt when she did not succeed was much like the depression her father fell into when criticized by his wife. She also saw that in many ways she had acted the role of her father’s “lover,” and that this cut her off from relationships with other men. Consciously, she began to counter the inner voice that critically judged herself and others. She became more open to men and tried to know them without judging them first. Eventually she met a warm, affectionate man, but for some time she was tempted to end the relationship because he wasn’t earning as much money as she thought he should. When she was able to recognize these criticisms as part of her mother’s voice, Susan was able to allow the relationship to live.
In this case the mother was the more dominant figure; the father’s negligence consisted of not opposing the mother’s compulsive ambitions. In a way, he loved his daughter “too much” and so kept her tied to him. Susan needed to recognize this to break the tight bind to her father and to see the effects of her mother’s influence.
Sometimes, as in the case of Mary, a daughter rebels against an overly authoritarian and rigid father. Her father was in the military and required military performance even from his children. Mary, whose temperament was friendly and spontaneous, rebelled against her father’s authoritarian attitude. As a teenager she took LSD and ran around with a fast crowd. Although she had artistic talent, Mary let it slide and then quit college in her sophomore year. Despite her father’s authoritarian and perfectionistic tendencies, he had a chronic disease which forced him to show vulnerability and weakness. Since he never admitted his vulnerability Mary experienced her father as though he were two different people—the strong, authoritarian judge, and the weak, sick man. The men in her dreams also appeared in these opposing ways. There were men with tiny phalluses who were impotent, and there were violent men trying to stab and kill her. Mary felt that the impotent men symbolized her tremendous lack of self-confidence, and that the violent, attacking men were the voice of self-depreciation. Mary’s mother was much like herself, a warm, outgoing woman, but she did not oppose her husband, Since Mary had a good relationship with her mother, she first turned to an older woman for support. But in this relationship she tended to play the role of pleasing daughter, while the older woman often criticized her in an authoritarian manner similar to that of Mary’s father. In the course of analysis she began to gain confidence in herself and recognized the double pattern of rebelling against the authority of the father, yet submitting to it by pleasing the older authoritarian woman. Eventually she was able to assert herself in relation to her older woman friend. Then as the threatening men and the impotent men began to disappear from her dreams, she began a relationship with an emotionally mature man whom she later married. She now had enough confidence in herself to accept the challenge of returning to her love of art and began to study a career in this field. With her new-found strength she was even able to have a meaningful talk with her father, who, in a moment of crisis due to his illness, acknowledged his vulnerability. This enabled a closer emotional relationship between father and daughter.
These are only four examples of wounded women who have suffered from injured relationships with their fathers. There are many variations on this theme. The following dream reveals the general psychological situation of a wounded woman who suffers from an impaired relation to the father.
I am a young girl trapped in a cage holding my baby. Outside is my father riding freely on a horse over green pastures. I long to reach him and try to get out of the cage, sobbing deeply. But the cage topples over. I am not sure whether my baby and I will be crushed by the cage or whether we will be free.
This dream images the separation between father and daughter and the imprisonment of the daughter and her creative potentialities. There is the longing to reach the free energy of the father. But the daughter must first get out of the cage, and this requires a risk. She and her baby may be crushed in the process, or they also may go free. While this is the dream of only one woman, I believe it portrays dramatically the way many other women have been imprisoned by a poor relation to the father, alienating them from a positive relation to fathering in themselves.
On the personal level, there are many ways the father-daughter wound can occur. The father may have been extremely weak and a cause of shame for his daughter; for example, a man who can’t hold a job or who drinks or gambles, etc. Or he may be an “absent father,” having left home by choice as does the man who “loves ’em and leaves ’em.” The absence may also be due to death, war, divorce, or illness—each of which separates the father from his family. Still another way a father can wound a daughter is to indulge her so much that she has no sense of limit, values, and authority. He may even unconsciously fall in love with her and thus keep her bound to him in this way. Or he may look down upon and devalue the feminine because his own inner feminine side has been sacrificed to the ideals of macho-masculine power and authority. He may be a hard worker, successful in his profession, but passive at home and not really actively involved with his daughter, i.e., a detached father. Whatever the case may be, if the father is not there for his daughter in a committed and responsible way, encouraging the development of her intellectual, professional, and spiritual side and valuing the uniqueness of her femininity, there results an injury to the daughter’s feminine spirit.
“The Feminine” is an expression that is currently being re-discovered and re-described anew by women out of their own experiences. Women have begun to realize that men have been defining femininity through their conscious and culturally conditioned expectations of women’s roles and through their unconscious projections on women. In contrast to the notion of femininity defined from a cultural or biological role, my approach is to see “the feminine” symbolically as a way of being, as an inherent principle of human existence. In my experience the feminine reveals itself primarily via images and emotional responses and I draw upon these in the course of this book.1
The father-daughter wound is not only an event happening in the lives of individual women. It is a condition of our culture as well.2 Whenever there is a patriarchal authoritarian attitude which devalues the feminine by reducing it to a number of roles or qualities which come, not from woman’s own experience, but from an abstract view of her—there one finds the collective father overpowering the daughter, not allowing her to grow creatively from her own essence.
Whether the father-daughter wound occurs on the personal level or the cultural level, or both, it is a major issue for most women today. Some women try to avoid dealing with it by blaming their fathers and/or men in general. Others may try to avoid it by denying there is a problem and living out the traditionally accepted feminine roles. But both these routes result in giving up responsibility for their own transformation, the one via blame, the other via adaptation. I believe the real task for women’s transformation these days is to discover for themselves who they are. But part of this discovery entails a dialogue with their history, with the developmental influences that have affected them personally, culturally, and spiritually.
As a daughter grows up, her emotional and spiritual growth is deeply affected by her relationship to her father. He is the first masculine figure in her life and is a prime shaper of the way she relates to the masculine side of herself and ultimately to men. Since he is “other,” i.e., different from herself and her mother, he also shapes her differentness, her uniqueness and individuality. The way he relates to her femininity will affect the way she grows into womanhood. One of his roles is to lead the daughter from the protected realm of the mother and the home into the outside world, helping her to cope with the world and its conflicts. His attitude toward work and success will color his daughter’s attitude. If he is confident and successful,
